Nicholas Barry

I hate Powerpoint. Do you hate Powerpoint? Almost everyone I know hates it. Normally I don't write about technology stuff here, but this is important, because so many people give mind-numbingly boring presentations using Powerpoint.

I was recently at a conference, and was blown away by several presentations I watched by two presenters. I asked one of them afterward, and she told me she had used the web service called Prezi to produce the presentations. Below is the first presentation I made using Prezi. Without the benefit of our narration, you may not get much content out of the presentation, but you can see how the presentation looks and feels.

What makes Prezi amazing is two things, in my mind. First, it uses a completely different paradigm from Powerpoint. Prezi is not based on slides, and does not force you to chop up complex ideas into slide-sized pieces. It also doesn't force you to shoehorn a nonlinear idea into a linear format. The way it accomplishes this is through a completely different, non-slide paradigm. Instead, it provides you with a blank, endless canvas on which to formulate ideas and draw diagrams. You create a presentation by choosing a path through the canvas. This makes it easy to create a narrative that doubles back on itself, returns to earlier points, and shows hierarchical and interrelated ideas.

The second thing that makes Prezi amazing is its professional look and feel when presenting. When you create a path throughout your canvas, Prezi automatically zooms and rotates the view as necessary to focus on whatever you want to show your audience. The result is a wonderfully polished presentation. It takes much less effort to create a beautiful presentation than it would with Powerpoint.

Because of the ease of creating engaging presentations that don't oversimplify complicated issues, I would love to see more people using this web service. Try it out!

In my Intersectoral Leadership class at USC, Professor Callahan asked each of our groups to choose a different article from the readings, analyze it in light of the theory presented by another article, spend 20 minutes planning a presentation, and present to the class.

I asked that our group focus on an article that exhorted the US to stop trying to create democracy in Afghanistan, and focus instead on making government function, while accepting that Afghanistan is hardly a unified state. I was interested because of my own experience teaching science in Afghanistan.

While preparing, Kiyomi, a friend and colleague of mine from Senator Steinberg's office, suggested we try to make our presentation "Sticky." Professor Callahan is a devotee of Malcolm Gladwell (as am I), and encourages us to incorporate insights from his books into our presentations, leadership style, and everyday thinking - which I think is a great idea. Gladwell's "Sticky" concept is something close to how memorable an idea is - how likely someone is to hold on to, and pass along, an idea.

I thought we could easily make our presentation Sticky by incorporating some personal story from my experience in Afghanistan. I thought about what story might be a good illustration of the points in our presentation, and finally thought of an excellent experience from a travel office. So I began our presentation with this story:

"I have gone to Afghanistan twice to teach science, and will never forget my experience there. One thing in particular that I remember is when we walked into a travel office to buy tickets back home. There were clocks on the wall displaying different time zones. The four clocks were labeled Paris, London, Tokyo, and Kabul."

I had drawn a row of four clocks without hands on a presentation pad beforehand, and I continued:

"The hour hands for Paris, London and Tokyo all looked something like this." I drew each, pointing up and to the left.

"The Kabul clock, on the other hand, looked like this," I said, as I drew in Kabul's hour hand, pointing down and to the right - in the opposite direction.

"Afghanistan," I continued, "Is on a different track from us. It isn't a westernized country like Japan or Germany that we can rebuild into a democracy. It's totally different, and we have to accept that when we are doing work there."

At the end of our presentation, Professor Callahan said, "Okay, stop. In my twelve years of doing this exercise, I have never seen so good a first presentation. The way Nick started with that story about his experience in Afghanistan grabbed you, and made you want to know more. Normally, I have the groups present right after each other. But I want all of you to take three to five minutes back with your groups to talk about how you can do what they did to make your presentations Sticky."

My personal story made our presentation stand head and shoulders above other presentations.